Table Of ContentNEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
JOYCE THROUGH
ˇ ˇ
LACAN AND ZIZEK
EXPLORATIONS
SHELLY BRIVIC
Joyce through Lacan and Žižek
NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Claire A. Culleton, Kent State University, Series Editor
Contemporary Irish Republican Prison Writing:
Writing and Resistance
by Lachlan Whalen (December 2007)
Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature:
From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee
by Mary M. McGlynn (April 2008)
Irish Periodical Culture, 1937–1972:
Genre in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland
by Malcolm Ballin (August 2008)
Joyce through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations
by Shelly Brivic (October 2008)
Joyce through Lacan
and Žižek
Explorations
Shelly Brivic
JOYCE THROUGH LACAN AND ŽIŽEK
Copyright © Shelly Brivic, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60330-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-37164-8 ISBN 978-0-230-61571-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230615717
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brivic, Sheldon, 1943–
Joyce through Lacan and Žižek : explorations / Shelly Brivic.
p. cm.—(New directions in Irish and Irish American literature)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Psychological fiction, English—History and criticism. 3. Lacan, Jacques,
1901–1981. 4. Žižek, Slavoj. 5. Psychoanalysis and literature—Ireland.
I. Title.
PR6019.O9Z5263175 2008
823(cid:2).912—dc22 2008007171
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2008
for David
u. s. w.
Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
List of Abbreviations xv
1 Introduction: Exploring Freedom through Language 1
Part I The Revolitionary Portrait of the Artist
2 Stephen Dedalus Gets Changed 25
3 Freedom through Figuration in A Portrait 45
4 Entwined Genders in A Portrait 61
5 Žižek, Fantasy, and Truth 81
Part II Ulysses Off Course
6 Let’s Get Lost: Exploration in Homer and Joyce 101
7 Structure as Discovery in Ulysses 121
8 Ulysses’ “Circe”: Dealing in Shame 143
Part III Finnegans Wake as the World
9 Reality as Fetish: The Crime in Finnegans Wake 163
10 The Africanist Dimension of Finnegans Wake 181
11 The Rising Sun: Asia in Finnegans Wake 195
Conclusion and Supplement: Exploration and Comedy 217
Notes 227
Works Cited 245
Index 259
Figures
1.1 The Borromean Knot 13
1.2 The Sinthome 14
5.1 Lacan’s Diagram of Truth 90
Preface
My primary purpose in Joyce through Lacan and Žižek is to bring out
the basic theories of Lacan’s seminars on Joyce (Seminar XXIII: Le
sinthome) so as to illuminate Joyce’s novels. These seminars may be one
of the major works of literary criticism of their age, yet they are difficult
and they have been described as incoherent. Having studied them for
years and benefited from recent advances in their explanation by others,
I try to present their main principles in clear, comprehensible terms while
reaching out to the complexity of their implications. The central concept
here is the sinthome, which Lacan derived from Joyce’s writing and made
central to the latest phase of Lacanian analysis. I interpret the sinthome
as a voluntary symptom that aims at the unknown to discover new
possibilities.
For Lacan, consciousness is made up of language that aims at an object
it can never reach, while Joyce developed as a model for life the idea of the
writer projecting words into a world he can never occupy. The d isparity
between our language and what it reaches toward causes the symptom,
but the recognition that the world is a fiction makes the symptom
voluntary. Because words can never connect with the world, they are
driven to move from one object to another, and this produces an
exhilarating freedom, yet no version of the goal of language can attain
reality. Although Lacan deploys the sinthome as a model for psychoanalysis,
both writers see this ongoing reattachment as a model for art, life, politics,
language, human relations, and philosophy. And in fact Lacan even sees
Joyce’s works as carrying out a process of Lacanian analysis.
In every field progress is made by realizing that there is a further level
and this is continually reprojected as a goal whose value is proportional
to its distance, so that the process of exploration a rticulates the activity
of the sinthome. My original subtitle for this book was “Exploring in
Language,” and the book still centers on the idea of exploration. This
procedure in Joyce, as revealed by Lacan, shapes the fundamental model
of writing, the nature of agency, the interface between the genders within
each individual, the activity of truth, the use of Homer, the techniques
that structure Ulysses, the operation of social economy, the framing of
injustice as patriarchal authority, the understanding of other races, and
the ability to extend consciousness toward the majority of the population
of the planet.
xii Preface
To help me to unfold the implications of Lacan’s thinking in social,
cultural, and political areas, I make much use of the works of Slavoj
Žižek, who has a gift for explaining and applying Lacan’s theories and
adds striking insights of his own. And to help explain Joyce’s insights
into gender and feminism, I refer to the ideas of Judith Butler, Luce
Irigaray, and other feminists.
Because I took a decade off from writing books on Joyce to write one
on American literature (Tears of Rage: The Racial Interface of Modern
American Fiction: Faulkner, Wright, Pynchon, Morrison took longer
than I expected), I gather material here from a dozen years. I hope that
the range of outlooks involving language, subjectivity, sexuality, politics,
colonialism, narrative structure, and so forth will operate to show the
scope of Joyce’s, Lacan’s, and Žižek’s thoughts, and their tendencies to
link the most diverse subjects to open up new perspectives. In fact, I hope
that this study will have the effect of ten books in one. By arranging Joyce
through Lacan and Žižek in a large number of short chapters, I seek to
minimize intellectual overload. The ideas of the three thinkers can be
complex, so I mean to allow readers access to their conceptual interplay
in manageable doses w ithout getting bogged down in technicalities.
Joyce, Lacan, and Žižek all see the world as made up of language and
they all focus relentlessly on departure, transition, and discovery. Joyce
began his career in fiction by writing stories without endings in Dubliners
and ended up writing endings without stories in Finnegans Wake. In
between he perfected a series of techniques for jumping away from the
frame of language into its peripheral possibilities. Lacan is known for
abruptly stopping analytic sessions so as to create new boundaries of
reverberation. He was continually mapping out diagrams of the
unconscious as a structure of language, and in the last phase of his work
that I focus on here, the lines of these diagrams began to move, to expand,
to grasp, and to release each other, and to wander into ever more
diversified configurations. Žižek is a c ontrarian who generally reverses
what is expected. The word paradox tends to be superfluous in his work
because virtually everything is paradoxical. His tone is illustrated in such
contradictory titles as Enjoy Your Symptom, The Plague of Fantasies,
and The Fragile Absolute. To write about such thinkers in an orderly way
risks reducing some of their most dynamic qualities. They all work by
mixing levels that seem too distant to connect and by deriving new modes
of thinking from their interplay. The tendency of my book to bound from
one area to another should serve to evoke such interplay, and to create a
conceptual amalgam that approaches self-multiplication.
In pursuing exploration and discovery, I mean to indicate that there is
virtually no end to it. I have only read a fraction of Lacan’s twenty-five
seminars, but whenever I dip into them, I find my mind stirred and
revitalized, confronted with new worlds. As for Žižek, I have no fear of
